Racing the Machine: Data Analytic Technologies and Institutional Inscription of Racialized Health Injustice.

Recent scientific and policy initiatives frame clinical settings as sites for intervening upon inequality. Electronic health records and data analytic technologies offer opportunity to record standard data on education, employment, social support, and race-ethnicity, and numerous audiences expect biomedicine to redress social determinants based on newly available data. However, little is known on how health practitioners and institutional actors view data standardization in relation to inequity.

The social life of biomedical data: Capturing, obscuring, and envisioning care in the digital safety-net.

Biomedical investment in digital technologies has flooded society with staggering volumes of data, spurring high-tech innovations such as performance metrics, clinical algorithms, and public data dashboards. In examining the social life of data artifacts, scholars draw from actor-network theory to emphasize data's ability to represent social reality while circulating within it, while others suggest formal data models fail to account for invisible relations on the ground. Yet little work has examined the role of human reflexivity in crafting complex human-data configurations in practice, such as how situated human actors relate to data representations within the social reality they intimately know themselves.

Capturing patients, missing inequities: Data standardization on sexual orientation and gender identity across unequal clinical contexts.

In effort to address fundamental causes and reduce health disparities, public programs increasingly mandate sites of care to capture patient data on social and behavioral domains within Electronic Health Records (EHRs). Data reporting drawing from EHRs plays an essential role in public management of social problems, and data on social factors are commonly cited as foundational for eliminating health inequities. Yet one major shortcoming of these data-centered initiatives is their limited attention to social context, including the institutional conditions of biomedical stratification and variation of care provision across clinical settings.

Health Equity Beyond Data: Health Care Worker Perceptions of Race, Ethnicity, and Language Data Collection in Electronic Health Records.

Background: Recent research and policy initiatives propose addressing the social determinants of health within clinical settings. One such strategy is the expansion of routine data collection on patient Race, Ethnicity, and Language (REAL) within electronic health records (EHRs). Although previous research has examined the general views of providers and patients on REAL data, few studies consider health care workers' perceptions of this data collection directly at the point of care, including how workers understand REAL data in relation to health equity.

The making of a population: Challenges, implications, and consequences of the quantification of social difference.

How do we make a difference? This paper traces the connections made between quantified knowledge, population health, and social justice by examining the efforts of population scientists to assess sexuality as a point of difference within population-based data systems, including on national health and social surveys, electronic medical records, and the Census. Population scientists emphasize the importance of measuring social difference in order to identify and remedy structural disadvantage. This evaluation requires the assessment of difference and the comparison of distinct groups across standardized outcome measures.

Examining the Sociocultural Context of HIV-related Risk Behaviors Among Kathoey (Male-to-female Transgender Women) Sex Workers in Bangkok, Thailand.

Kathoey (male-to-female transgender) sex workers (KSW) in Thailand are at high risk for sexually transmitted infections; however, few qualitative studies have been conducted to understand the sociocultural context of engaging in HIV risk behaviors. A total of 24 participants were purposively sampled in Bangkok based on KSW work venues and substance use. Results revealed the importance of participants' understanding of the self in relation to establishing economic independence through sex work, which could then be used to re-establish support from family, who often have not accepted a son's gender transition.

A Tale of Two Cities: Access to Care and Services Among African-American Transgender Women in Oakland and San Francisco.

Purpose: The San Francisco Bay Area attracts people from all over the country due to the perception of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) acceptance and affirmation. African-American transgender women are severely marginalized across society and as such have many unmet health and social service needs. This study sought to quantitatively assess unmet needs among African-American transgender women with a history of sex work by comparing residents of Oakland versus San Francisco.

Assessing access to care for transgender and gender nonconforming people: a consideration of diversity in combating discrimination.

Transgender and gender nonconforming people face stigma and discrimination from a wide variety of sources and through numerous social realms. Stigma and discrimination originating from biomedicine and health care provision may impact this group's access to primary care. Such stigma and discrimination may originate not only from direct events and past negative experiences, but also through medicine's role in providing treatments of transitioning, the development of formal diagnoses to provide access to such treatments, and the medical language used to describe this diverse group.